Sunday, 27 April 2014

Here
is another excerpt from my forthcoming book, Left Field- Michael Foot's visit to
Mostar.

In
the months leading up to the opening of the Pavarotti Music Centre in
December 1997, we had numerous visits from local, and not so local,
politicians. I remember stumbling across ex-Tory minister, Michael -
Something of the Night - Howard in the reception area. He was being
shown the nearly-completed building by an official from the EU
Administration offices. I asked him what he was doing in Bosnia
Hercegovina. ‘I’m
on a fact-finding mission,’ he said. ‘Who
are you meeting to do that? I asked. ‘Politicians,’ he said. I
answered, ‘Mr Howard, you should know better than anyone. You don’t
go to them for facts.’ He did laugh.

In
July I had watched Steve Biko’s ex-driver, the percussionist,
Eugene Skeef, run workshops in the town. He had been invited to
Mostar by Nigel Osborne and had recently worked with Edmund Mhlongo
in Kwa Mashu on the Ngoma cultural education project. Remembering
Mandela’s words to me that our music centre was a project needed in
Africa, I realised that Eugene was a key to internationalising the
PMC. I had also heard about the success of his djembe
classes with children in the UK.

His
first workshops were so successful I offered him the job of director
of music development at the centre. He agreed to start work when the
building opened. A few days before Eugene returned to London, we
went to Dubrovnik. There we met two German doctors and they were
interested to hear about our work in Mostar. Eugene had their eyes
popping with his words about the importance of music and rhythm in
our lives. One of the doctors said he spoke like a poet. He laughed
and rewarded them with, “listen for the cadence of the
sun in its journey that never ends. When night falls and the song
fades, follow the rhythm of the moon when your voice disappears like
a bird.” Those words got us a
bed for the night. When we told them we were going to spend the night
sleeping on the beach, they invited us to stay at their hotel, Villa
Dubrovnik. Much to our surprise, there, at the bar was a politician I
was delighted to meet; Michael Foot and his wife, Jill Craigie. They
told us they stayed there every summer.

Sitting
on the hotel balcony overlooking the old city walls, we discussed the
war and the film he and Jill had made about it, Two Hours
From London. I told them what a
good documentary it was, but that it was a bit light on the
Bosnian-Croatian war and that they should visit Mostar. Michael
agreed to come with us the next day. Jill opted out because she
didn’t like travelling along the serpentine roads.

Eugene
and I showed Michael round Mostar’s old town. He was already eighty
four and walked very slowly. It was impossible to use a car in
Mostar’s narrow streets, but he was determined to see as much as he
could. We ended our walk at the Centre where he sat down at last in
the uncompleted courtyard. 'This is very impressive, David. I am sure
you will be doing wonderful work in this building.'

That
afternoon I drove him back to Dubrovnik and we spent the three hour
drive discussing politics and poetry. I told him I’d enjoyed Paul
Foot's Red Shelley,
his nephew's book about the poet. Michael laughed and broke into,
'Rise like lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew, That in sleep have fallen on
you, Ye are many, they are few.'

After
a pause he added, ‘But you know, Paul is wrong. Byron was the
greater poet and greater revolutionary. Have you read "Darkness"?’

‘No,
I haven’t.’

‘Stuck
on Shelley, are you?' Another pause and then he recited, 'They
slept on the abyss without a surge-- The waves were dead; the tides
were in their grave, The moon their mistress had expir'd before; The
winds were withered in the stagnant air, And the clouds perish'd;
Darkness had no need, Of aid from them--She was the
Universe.' Michael smiled
at me. ‘Byron goes further than Shelley. You must read him.’

When
I got back to Mostar, Eugene and I went to a cafe close to the
suspension bridge which had replaced the destroyed stone bridge. We
watched in horror as a young man climbed over the rope hand-rail and
hurled himself the twenty metres backwards into the Neretva. We
rushed down to the river and Eugene and I managed to grab hold of his
arms. We thought he should go to hospital, but he said he was okay
and got up to walk away. I persuaded him to come to my flat which was
close to the bridge.

He
was soaking wet and Eugene gave him one of his T-shirts and a pair
of his trousers. Over coffee he told us he'd come from Kiseljak in
central Bosnia. He had never recovered from the loss of his mother,
father and two sisters in the war. He had an aunt who had been living
in Mostar and had come to look for her. She, too, had been killed. In
despair, he had spent the last of his money on drink and then had
decided to end his life. He had been disappointed to find the
suspension bridge was four metres lower than the old bridge which had
been twenty-four metres high at its apex. But he still thought he
would die if he fell backwards into the water. While he was talking
Eugene played soothing rhythms on his djembe.
When he left us we felt guilty we hadn’t been more persistent in
insisting he go to the hospital.

Two
months later a package arrived at my London address. It was a
collection of Byron’s poems with a dedication on the inside cover,
“Byronic greetings from Michael Foot, with many thanks
for a most instructive visit to Mostar, Sept 1997. Read especially
Don Juan, right through non-stop, as I did again. See also Darkness.
It has reflections of Mostar.”

I
don’t remember giving him my address so I assume he must have
contacted the War Child office. All these years later Michael’s
‘Byron’ is on my shelf and I dip into it a lot. I always
start by reading the dedication. I don’t know what happened to the
man who fell from the bridge and what he did with his darkness.